Chapter 327: Crystal Lake City
While Owain sought to drown himself in the pleasures of the flesh to relieve the tensions of his failures, Ashlynn and Heila celebrated their recent victories in Crystal Lake City in very different ways.
There were very few attractions that could draw outsiders to the sleepy city built by the Ancient Clan. When the flighty and animated Talauia had described it to Ashlynn, the city sounded as interesting as a stick in the mud. It wasn’t until Jacques showed them a few of the local attractions that Ashlynn realized that being a stick in the mud wasn’t an entirely bad thing.
"De Ancient Clan, she’s filled with traditions dat are thousands of years old," Jacques had explained when they entered the city. "De way tings’ happen here, everything dat people do, it’s jus’ like it was a thousand years ago and more. Not much new gets built here, but de places we have, dey get fixed up instead of tearing down and building new."
"Families almost never leave where dey started," he said, his voice catching briefly as he looked at sprawling family home on one corner. "But by de time enough years have gone by, ever bit of it has been rebuilt at least once or twice," he explained.
The Ancient Clan’s homes reflected the same harmony with their environment that Ashlynn had seen in their shops and other buildings. Unlike the tight-packed buildings of Blackwell City that tried to squeeze as many people as possible into the valuable harbor district, these homes spread out languidly, each one surrounded by broad verandas raised slightly off the ground.
The overhanging roofs extended far beyond the walls, creating deep pools of shade where members of the Ancient Clan lounged on cushions or woven mats, their scaled hides soaking in what rays of sunlight filtered through the cypress canopy.
Most of the buildings were low and squat, seldom raising more than two or three stories in height and constructed from baked mud bricks or rough cut timber. What surprised Ashlynn, however, was the number of cypress and tulip trees that lined the roads or filled the spaces between those buildings.
As they wandered deeper into Crystal Lake City, she was repeatedly struck by how different it felt from human cities she’d known or even the neatly organized districts of High Fen City. Here, there were no rigid streets laid out in careful grids, instead, packed-earth paths meandered between the ancient trees like streams finding their natural course. The paths widened into small squares where people gathered, then narrowed again as they wound between buildings, creating a rhythm that felt as natural as breathing.
As witches attuned to trees, all of them were sensitive to places where people had chosen to dominate the landscape with dense construction and the crowded life of urban centers, but walking through Crystal Lake City didn’t feel very different from walking through the forest. Certainly, there were more people about, but those people gave way before nature’s most majestic trees and built their homes and shops in the spaces between rather than clearing vast stretches of land to house their people.